RP4 Climate variability & teleconnections news | CLEX

An improved Tropical Pacific Observing System that is responsive to user needs will provide for better understanding and prediction of the climate system, which will reduce climate uncertainty for society.

We can expect more occurrences of extreme weather associated with eastern Pacific El Niño events (the strongest and most destructive of the two types of El Niño events), which will have pronounced implications for the twenty-first century climate, extreme weather and ecosystems.

The ocean plays a critical role in the climate system by transferring heat from the tropics toward the poles, helping to regulate regional climates. How this heat transport may change in the future remains a first order question in climate science.

Antarctic sea ice extent underwent a rapid decline in the spring of 2016 and is still well below average now. CLEX researchers have tied the decline to natural variability of both the atmosphere and ocean in two articles published in Nature Communications this month.

In 2016, Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes researchers and colleagues measured Southern Ocean INPs for the first time in over four decades. The numbers of these particles were extremely low compared to other oceans and 100 times lower than the previous Southern Ocean measurement program conducted in the 1970s.

Deep ocean reefs are likely to transform with global warming bringing together species from temperate and tropical waters that may have never coexisted before, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change.

CLEX researchers find that ocean sea-ice models generally agreed on changes to average yearly cycle of freeze and melt in Antarctica, with dynamic processes dominating the sea ice edge and thermodynamic processes dominating the interior of the sea ice pack. However, the models disagreed about the trends of sea ice volume.

Forecasting El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, and anticipating how they may change with global warming remains a significant challenge for climate researchers. An ENSO complexity workshop held in November 2017 produced a follow-up paper summarising what we know about ENSO and its predictability.

The Central American mid‐summer drought (MSD) is the decline in rainfall during the middle of the wet season over Central America, which has been shown to have strong effects on agriculture and bushfires in Costa Rica. The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) has been shown to influence Costa Rican rainfall on intra‐seasonal time scales, and therefore may be important to the MSD. This research aims to find the connection between the MJO and MSD.

CLEX researchers found that counter-clockwise rotating eddies in the Southern Ocean mix the ocean deeper in winter, allowing more nutrients to enter their interiors, leading to higher productivity. This work is important because eddy productivity plays a significant role in the exchange of carbon between the ocean and the atmosphere.